production blog

techniques behind the prototype #1 “lets build it”

This will be the first of a hand full of posts dedicated to the techniques used in our last prototype. I’ll try to cover everything important, but feel free to suggest areas we should cover in more detail. Just let us know! (via posts on our Facebook page, or by commenting here)

I’ve already written a little bit about parts of the production in earlier posts, but lets start from the beginning to give you a complete picture of how we did it.

If you want to read all posts dedicated to the production sprint (resulting in the prototype), please click here.

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design and prep

As always, a concept sketch is the first thing to do. I prefer to draw on paper, so most of the elements were drawn separately, scanned and then placed/transformed digitally to form the final concept. I’ve altered and changed it quite a few times (especially before the story was locked down) but eventually settled with this:

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Next, we built a very rough dummy set in 3D to define some of the proportions, which 1. enabled us to test the set in unity very early, 2. makes it easier or even possible for multiple artists to work and contribute to the same set.

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all elements, one by one

We split everything into several sub groups, modeling tasks if you will, and started to distribute them between Babette (Kahn), Florian (Stucki), Thorsten (Kesse) and myself. Lets take our little toy ship as example.

Babette started modeling the ship after we locked down the set layout and collected some references, and after a few nerve-wracking iterations of changes (sorry ;) ) she ended up with this great result:

Every single element was built with basically the same emphasis on detail and quality, which (no surprise here) took up most of the production time. A stylized approach would have saved probably 3/4 of the work (this number would be even higher if we didn’t have as many animations), so if you start to work on a game, keep that in mind ;)

we’ll cover the rest of the creation process next time, so stay tuned!